Salento, Colombia

So after my rather depressing and uncertain few days in Medellin, I was really happy to once again meet up with my Swiss friend Irene (who I had met in Cartagena) and to accompany her and her two friends first to the town of Manizales for a night, and then on to Salento in Colombia´s Zona Cafetera, or it´s coffee-growing region. Manizales is a town built on several steep hills, and when we arrived the taxi took us up and up and up some more hills to our hostel which was appropriately called Mountain House. There wasn´t much to see as far as touristy sites, but we did take a taxi back down into town to the main church and square just as it got dark. Then we walked a bit and ended up at a big mall, and decided to see a movie. We saw the Julia Roberts and Tom Hanks movie in a theater that was as modern as one in the States, but the cost was only $3! I really enjoyed just relaxing and watching a movie about regular life. The next day, we took a taxi up to a lookout point, but it was too cloudy all around us to be able to see anything. So then we headed for Salento. When we arrived there, it was rainy and near dusk, and therefore the town wasn´t too impressive at first. We checked into our dorm and just relaxed that first night - it was my last night to hang out with Irene, as she headed back to Medellin the next day. My first full day there, we got up early to head to the central square where there were jeeps waiting to take us to the Valle de Cocora, where we were to go on a supposedly beautiful hike. While we were waiting for the jeep to leave, a couple of very friendly local stray dogs made friends with us, and when we finally left in the jeeps, they ran alongside the jeep for several miles!
The hike, as predicted, really was amazing! First, we hiked along a river, and had to cross about 6 different precarious bridges haphazardly built from bamboo or wood, which was fun. Eventually, we ended up at a hummingbird reserve, where we enjoyed hot chocolate with cheese. Then my friend Rebecca and I continued on up another path that was much more steep but which was completely worth it for the views from the top. The sun came out and we got some great pictures from what seemed like the top of the mountain! Then we walked back down another way and through some of what the Lonely Planet calls an almost hallucinatorily beautiful sight - hills covered with really tall wax palm trees. I kept thinking of Dr. Seuss´ book The Lorax, and thought that must have been where he got his inspiration for the book! It definitely was one of the times on my trip where I had the surreal feeling of being on a movie set and not actually in a real physical place - it was just so awesome!
I kept thinking I should pack up and move on, but I wasn´t in a hurry for some reason. Salento was just so relaxing and peaceful. A couple of days later, I was invited by one of the guys in my dorm to have chicken curry dinner that he was making. It ended up being the perfect night - it was really cold and rainy, and the guys made a huge fire in the fireplace and we moved the table next to it, and about 6 of us feasted on the really delicious meal that Dave had cooked. The next day, a few of us went down to the finca, or farm, that the owner of our hostel also owns, to take the tour of it in Spanish. It didn´t make much sense to me, but it was nice to be down on a working coffee farm. The next day, I took the English tour (the owner is British), which I got much more out of, and which made me decide to accompany a few of the guys from my dorm on Monday morning to volunteer there. The deal was that we worked for four hours in the morning, and they provided our lunch for free. This is how Tim (the owner) got away with having tourists work for free and without a work visa. I thought, as I headed down the steep, rocky, dirt road towards the farm early that morning, that I would surely only be working for one day, just for the interesting experience. I was wrong - I loved it! Mostly, I loved it because there was a great group of people working as well. The first day, there were 5 of us. Three of us - Tim from Germany, Lisa from Canada, and I - were assigned to weed around some small coffee saplings that were growing from plastic bags. After that, we "cleaned" some of the bigger coffee trees, which meant that we broke off the dead branches so the trees could grow better. It may sound rather boring, but it was actually really enjoyable, and interesting - mainly due to the fact that we were cleaning trees on steep hills that were on about 70-degree angles or so! This meant a lot of falling, especially on Tim´s part, and therefore a lot of laughing on my part! Since I enjoyed the first day so much, and loved the people I was working with, I ended up deciding to stay for the whole week and keep working. Everyone who was working ended up gradually moving down to stay in the dorms on the finca, and I was the last to move down. I stayed in the "penthouse" for the last four nights, which was a private room built out of bamboo above the main area, and which had a great view of the whole valley below, as well as a balcony with a hammock. Since it was open on one side, it got really cold at night, but they provided me with extra blankets so I was nice and warm. Even before I moved down, we were having fabulous dinners just about every night, cooked mainly by our new friend David from England. He claimed that he didn´t know how to cook, and just enjoyed trying to do so, but we all agreed that this was not the case. He was able to produce delicious meals every night, with the four of us as his assistants of course. We had currys, kebabs, burgers, and one really delicious brunch. Since Salento was small and therefore there wasn´t much to do in town, and since most nights we couldn´t be bothered to walk the ten-minute steep and dark road up to town anyway, we had a lot of hours to wile away cooking. I became the official guacamole-maker, and proceeded to make it many nights even after we left the farm. We also kept making a tomato chutney called aogao that was popular in that region, and is really easy to make. There were actual meals where all we had was chutneys and dips and patacones (fried and squashed plantains) for dipping. I also became the garlic bread-maker, and definitely want to make it the "Colombian" way when I get home! I have no doubt that that week on the farm is the best I have eaten on my entire trip so far! Lisa and I were the only two to work every day that week on the farm, which of course meant we had to tease the guys about our superior female strength! Our jobs varied every day, which was nice. One day, we picked coffee beans (which look more like berries), but there were very few, and of course we were still on the super steep hills, so that day wasn´t our favorite. I fell that day and caught my leg on a tree stump that I didn´t see and ended up with a big bruise. Another day, Lisa convinced the guys who actually work on the farm (and who supervised us) to let us use machetes! That day was the most physically exhausting, but also the most fun. We both had blisters after about 10 minutes of using them, but we helped clear a large part of a field, once again on really steep hills. The guys didn´t want us to use the machetes, since they are obviously really dangerous (one guy pulled up his pant leg to reveal his huge machete-inflicted scar), but we must have seemed trust-worthy enough because they decided to let us give it a try. We think the guys thought that we would tire shortly and want to move onto something else, but other than taking occasional breaks to clean trees and let our fingers rest, we did manage to chop for most of the four hours. On our last day, we were given the job that made us the most nervous - coffee trees grow the best in pairs, and we had to look at newly sprouting plants (they sprout from the old tree stumps of former trees) and decide which two sprouts were the strongest, and pull out all of the others. We felt that we were incapable of making the correct decisions, and that they shouldn´t trust us with the future of their coffee trees! Lisa and I became upset after we conferred over an especially confusing tree, where all of the sprouts looked strong and we didn´t feel comfortable pulling any of them out. We asked Tim for a third opinion, and without talking about it first, he made a decision and ripped out the exact ones that we had thought we would keep, and then proceeded to rip out some of the branches off of the ones that he did leave (which was not the right way to do it at all)! After that, we were certain we were ruining the future coffee drinking of all Salento backpackers. At least we were comforted by the fact that the farm is not a "real" coffee farm, in the sense that the coffee made there is only used for the hostel that we were staying at, and not exported. The owner does have an idea though that may eventually take off - where he lets people grow their own coffee. Essentially, they would get a row of coffee plants that would be only theirs, and they could watch the whole process of growing and harvesting online, and then their coffee would be shipped right to their door. If that ever really happens, I doubt they will use backpacker labor anymore!
On Friday night, after our last day of working on the farm, we met some of the finca workers up in town and went to play some tejo. This is a game that reminds me a bit of cornhole, the beanbag game we play back home. You throw a heavy metal disk at a board full of clay, and with a target in the middle. If you hit the target, there is a big explosion because the little packets around the target are full of gun powder! It was a good time for sure. The others left the farm to continue traveling one by one, but Lisa, Tim, and I couldn´t bear to leave over the weekend. We finally decided to move on on Monday morning, but that we would all leave together, which would make it easier. Salento was just one of those places where life slows down, and one of those magical places we all long to find while traveling. I will always remember it as one of my favorite places in the world.